


The Definition of Madness

by chamel



Series: Whumptober 2020 Prompt Fills [2]
Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Difficult Decisions, Feelings Realization, Food as a Metaphor for Love, Friends to Lovers, Getting Together, Hurt/Comfort, Idiots in Love, Illya Whump, Injury, Kissing, M/M, Napoleon Whump, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Sacrifice, Temporary Character Death, Time Loop, Whumptober, Whumptober 2020, because it's a time loop of course
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-23
Updated: 2020-10-29
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:01:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 17,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27156319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chamel/pseuds/chamel
Summary: They say the definition of madness is doing the same thing and expecting a different result.Or, Illya gets stuck in a very whumpy time loop
Relationships: Illya Kuryakin & Napoleon Solo & Gaby Teller, Illya Kuryakin/Napoleon Solo
Series: Whumptober 2020 Prompt Fills [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1966801
Comments: 105
Kudos: 199





	1. No. 22: Drugged

**Author's Note:**

> I got The Hives' song "Try It Again" stuck in my head along with this concept, and this is the result. The plan is to post a short chapter (nearly) every day that goes with that day's [Whumptober 2020 prompts](https://whumptober2020.tumblr.com). Each prompt is given in the title of the chapter.
> 
> The first chapter is pretty much just the setup and isn't particularly whumpy, but it will certainly be going downhill (hah) from here. Appropriate tags will be added as we go. And, FWIW, this is definitely more along the lines of _Edge of Tomorrow_ than _Groundhog's Day_

_You're ready for a new round_  
_Don't it look like it's gonna be fun, be fun_  
_Up from the floor on the count of ten_  
_Oh you get up, you get down and you try it again_  
—The Hives, "Try It Again"

“Fuck!”

Illya sits bolt-upright in his bed at the safehouse, and it’s barely another heartbeat before he has his gun in his hand and is ripping open the door to his bedroom. Have they been discovered? Is the safehouse compromised? Are they being attacked?

Instead he finds Napoleon in the kitchen muttering a litany of colorful swears under his breath as he holds his left hand under the tap. Gaby joins Illya in the doorway only moments later, the expression on her face a somewhat odd mix of concern and irritation.

“I take it we’re not being attacked?” she asks through a yawn, pushing errant strands of hair out of her face.

Napoleon looks up at them and winces, looking almost sheepish. “Ah, no. I didn’t expect the handle of that pan to be that hot.”

“Hmph,” Gaby huffs, then immediately turns around to return to her room.

“You had to be up anyway!” Napoleon calls after her, but whatever she grumbles back is unintelligible.

Illya steps closer to the sink and sees an angry red welt on Napoleon’s palm. His partner hisses softly as the cool water splashes over the burn, and Illya moves past him to the freezer, which has thankfully been stocked.

“You don’t make a very good alarm clock, Cowboy,” Illya says as he hands him a bag of frozen vegetables.

“So very sorry about that, Peril,” Napoleon bites out sarcastically. He squeezes his eyes shut, mumbling under his breath when he presses the makeshift ice pack to his hand. “God damn cheap pans without properly insulated handles.”

Humming softly at Napoleon’s grumbling, Illya goes to get the medical supplies that typically only come out _after_ a job, thank you very much. There’s some burn cream inside, he knows, and he tosses the whole thing at Napoleon, who just manages to catch it with his uninjured hand.

“Better not have to save your ass today because of that,” Illya mutters at him before he goes to get himself ready. He’s already dressed, because he tends to sleep fully clothed before missions, but he still needs to gather the rest of his tactical gear and weapons. Plus, he really doesn’t want to listen to Napoleon complain, which is currently what he’s doing based on the curses drifting in from the next room.

By the time he reemerges Napoleon is still fumbling with gauze as he tries to bandage the wound one-handed. For a moment Illya considers going over to assist him, but then he seems to have actually gotten it anyway as he rips the medical tape with his teeth and shoves everything else back into the bag.

“Wouldn’t want you to actually _help_ ,” Napoleon accuses, glaring at him.

Illya just shrugs. “You seem to have done fine.”

Napoleon narrows his eyes at Illya and huffs, but he’s caught: either he protests this statement and admits that no, he did need Illya’s help, or he accepts the backhanded compliment and tacitly admits that Illya was right. Illya just manages to suppress a smug smirk, but only because he’d actually like to eat some of the omlet that Napoleon put together that morning.

Sure enough, Napoleon grabs the offending pan (with an oven mitt this time, Illya notes) and divides the eggs inside into three portions, then wordlessly pushes one of the plates across the counter toward Illya. They eat in silence, standing at the counter, while Gaby bangs around in the other part of the safehouse. Illya watches out of the corner of his eye as Napoleon flexes his hand experimentally, wincing as he does.

It’s definitely not a good development. Illya considers suggesting that they put the mission off for a few days, or that Napoleon hang behind, but he knows that neither will go over well. Napoleon is as stubborn as anyone Illya has ever known—the way he pushed himself to the limit almost immediately after coming out of Rudy’s chair had driven that home early in their working relationship—and he will certainly dismiss a small burn on his non-dominant hand as trivial.

Besides, he doesn’t need to say anything. When Gaby finally reappears she’s wearing her own tactical gear and a surly frown. “Don’t you think you should probably stay back today?” she asks Napoleon.

“What?” he answers, looking confused, like he’s already forgotten about the injury. She looks pointedly at his bandaged hand, and he waves her off. “Oh, this? It’s nothing. I’ve worked through much worse.”

Gaby looks skeptical, but she, too, knows that it’s not worth arguing with him about. Instead she eats her portion of the eggs, still frowning as Napoleon leaves the kitchen to finalize his own preparations for the mission.

“You’re ok with this?” she asks Illya.

“Not really,” he shrugs. “But he’s not going to listen to me.”  
  
Gaby tilts her head, giving him a shrewd look he doesn’t really understand. “He might.”

“He won’t,” Illya insists. They stare at each other for a moment, and Illya has the uncomfortable feeling that she is evaluating him in some way. “If he says he can work through it, I trust him. I trust him not to endanger the mission or our lives.”

These are words he could not have imagined speaking only a year ago, but spending that much time with someone, and trusting them with your life as many times as he has, certainly changes your perspective.

“What about his own?” Gaby asks, arcing a brow at him quizzically.

Illya doesn’t have an answer to that question

* * *

The compound they’re infiltrating is halfway up a mountain with only a single, narrow road leading to it, so they have no choice but to approach overground. The climb takes all day, and Illya would find it all surprisingly pleasant—it’s a beautiful day, and the views are stunning—if it weren’t for the fact that he knows at the end of it they’ll be walking into a highly dangerous situation. Dusk is just beginning to fall when they approach the fencing around the sector they’ve identified as the best access point. Illya’s CO2 laser makes short work of the chain link, and they slip inside without tripping any alarms.

It’s far more deserted than they expected, which should be a good thing but instead just makes a sense of unease settle into Illya’s bones. But there’s no way their targets could know that UNCLE was coming, no way they could have seen the team’s approach. It is more likely that they’re just overly confident in their mountain fortress, such as it were, and not expecting the infiltration.

At least, this is what Illya keeps telling himself as they make their way deeper into the compound, and his feelings of disquiet only grow.

The plan was to split up—the compound is huge, and they have only a vague idea of where the data they are looking for might be kept—and there’s no way to change that now. They pause at the chosen rally point and nod silently to each other, and then Illya’s partners fade into the darkness surrounding them.

Right. Search his sector, back to the rally point in 30 minutes.

He should have turned around the minute he found a buildng inexplicably sitting where none had been marked on the map. He should have turned around when his nose had been assulted by harsh chemical odors the moment he slipped inside. He should _definitely_ have turned around when his vision started going just a bit fuzzy and his hearing dulled like there was cotton in his ears.

But the building seems empty, and if their targets are working on chemical weapons UNCLE needs to know, and so he does not turn around until he hears a soft tread behind him.

The man standing there regards him curiously, like he’s not alarmed at all to find a giant, heavily armed, Russian spy in his facility. Dimly, Illya thinks he knows why. He can feel his grip loosening on his rifle, can feel himself slowing until it feels unmistakably like he’s moving through some kind of thick porridge.

“Intriguing,” the man says, and his voice sounds like it is coming from a great distance.

Illya wonders how he’s not affected by whatever is hanging in the air, clogging Illya’s lungs and making it increasingly difficult to breathe. He knows he needs to move, to get out of here, to get back to the rally point and try to warn his team, but it is becoming obvious that it’s going to be impossible. At least he can hope that by distracting them here, Napoleon and Gaby can get out.

“Go collect the others,” the man tells someone that seems to be just outside of Illya’s field of view. “We may need them for leverage.”

Someone tugs the rifle out of Illya’s hands, then pulls his wrists together and binds them roughly behind his back. A moment later his legs are kicked savagely from behind and he lands hard on his knees on the concrete floor, but the pain only manages to be a dull throb through the fog in his mind. His vision continues to narrow until all he can see is the man standing in front of him, silhouetted by a blinding white light pouring through an open door. Then the light is blocked in part by more figures coming through it, and oh, no, it cannot be.

Surely they did not get the drop on both of his partners. Surely this is some kind of hallucination.

With one, final burst of strength, Illya struggles futiliy against the bindings and feels the rope dig sharply into his wrists. It’s no good. He bends forward, gasping for breath in air that feels as thick as pea soup, and blacks out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading! Comments and kudos are guaranteed to give your friendly authors that burst of seratonin to keep them happy and writing! 😁 (But seriously I treasure every one of them ❤️)


	2. No. 23: Exhaustion

Illya gasps as he wakes, still choking on air that’s too thick to be breathable, but what fills his lungs is comparatively sweet and fresh despite the fact that it’s been shut up too long inside a musty safehouse and smells vaguely like onions and cooking eggs.

 _It was a nightmare_ , he thinks, still huffing his breaths. The light is dim in the bedroom, but he can see that he is, in fact, lying in his bed. He can hear the soft sounds of Napoleon in the kitchen, cooking breakfast.

“Fuck!” Napoleon swears loudly.

For a moment, Illya forgets to breathe again. It can’t be. He pushes himself out of bed quickly and hisses at the unexpected pain in his knees. _What the—?_ Pressing his fingertips into his kneecaps yields a bloom of discomfort, like they had been bruised, like he had landed hard on them.

_It can’t be._

He yanks the door to his room open and finds Gaby already tutting over Napoleon in the kitchen, pushing her sleep-mussed hair out of her face while their partner runs cold water over his burned hand.

“Impossible,” Illya blurts, causing them both to look up at him in confusion.

“Christ, Peril, are you ok?” Napoleon asks, momentarily forgetting about his own injury. “You look like you haven’t slept at all.”

Illya knows his eyes must look wild, which is probably fair because he feels like he might be going insane. “What day is it?” he demands.

“What?” Gaby says, gaping at him.

“ _What day is it?_ ”

“October twelfth,” Napoleon answers carefully. The furrow of concern in his brow deepens. “Why?”

“Have we been up to the compound?” Illya asks. “Yesterday, did we go?”  
  
Slowly, like she’s trying not to spook a wild animal, Gaby moves around the counter and approaches Illya with her hand outstretched. “Illya, what is going on?”

“ _Did we go?_ ” he snaps, stumbling backward and wincing against the pain in his knees.

Gaby gives her head a little shake. “No, we got here yesterday. Don’t you remember?”

He does remember arriving at the safehouse, remembers their now-routine thorough check of the house and settling in over dinner. But the thing is, he also remembers Napoleon’s burned hand, and climbing up the mountain, and cutting through the fence… and he remembers them all being captured. Remembers falling to his knees on a concrete floor, remembers choking on some chemical in the air. He doesn’t say any of this.

“I…” he says, trailing off as he looks from Napoleon and Gaby and back again. The whole thing would sound insane, he knows, and as he stands there it is starting to seem insane even to him. He swallows hard. “Just… just a vivid dream.”

Illya retreats to the bathroom before either of them can say anything more. He needs some time to think. He needs to calm down. There must be another explanation, even if he doesn’t know what it could possibly be. The porcelain of the sink is cold under his hands, grounding, and he forces himself to breathe in and out slowly.

Eventually he looks up at his reflection in the mirror and fuck, he does look like shit. There are heavy dark circles under his bloodshot eyes, and his cheeks are sallow. He _feels_ like he didn’t sleep the previous night, exhaustion heavy in his bones, even though he knows he must have slept.

 _Just a terrible dream_ , he tells himself.

He’s almost starting to believe it, but then he reaches up to pull the medical supplies off the shelf next to the sink for Napoleon and catches sight of his wrist. The skin is rubbed raw, as if by rope bindings, and there is simply no way that could have possibly happened except…

Illya leaves the bathroom under the watchful stares of his partners and says no more about his ‘dream’.

“Maybe we should put the op off for a day or two,” Gaby suggests, her arms crossed in front of her chest.

“ _No_ ,” Napoleon and Illya say in unison. Well, at least they agree on that.

“We’ll be fine, Chop shop,” Illya tells her, and hopes he’s right.

* * *

The hike to the compound is much the same as it was, excepting the fact that his knees protest every step until the pain finally recedes to a dull ache, and the exhaustion still hasn’t left his bones. His partners watch him carefully the whole way, clearly waiting for him to show any more signs of his earlier madness, but he knows better now. And if he happens to know exactly where Gaby will trip on a root, or the precise way that Napoleon will complain about the lunch he himself packed, Illya keeps it to himself.

He also keeps it to himself when they split up at the rally point, even though he wants to insist that they stay together. Just because he apparently had some kind of strange, precient dream, doesn’t mean that things will work out exactly that way. It’s disconcerting that he doesn’t know how Gaby and Napoleon were captured, but he can at least make his own choices to change the terrible outcome he’d forseen.

When he finds the building, right where it’s not supposed to be, he skirts carefully around its perimeter first. It really does seem to be empty, so the people who appeared must have entered from somewhere else. He checks each of the surrounding buildings, taking note of the group of five armed men in one and ten in another. They must have been part of his capture, but his vision had been too compromised to be sure of anything.

What he does not find is any sign of the man who had given the orders. Illya wonders if he tripped some kind of undetectable silent alarm by entering the building the previous time, and then he wonders if he could trip it again to draw the man out and still leave the building fast enough to get caught. In the end, he decides it’s too risky with all of the armed guards in the area. He’s supposed to meet his team back at the rally point in five minutes, so he can just report what he’s learned and they can make a plan from there.

Except his partners don’t return to the rally point. Not after five minutes, and not after ten. Illya swears softly under his breath and does the only thing he can do: begins searching parts of the compound that his partners were assigned to cover. The night stretches on, inky black shadows gaining luminous contrasts as the moon rises, and he finds nothing. No sign that they had ever been there. He must be missing something, but he can’t see what.

Eventually he returns to the rally point—and finds no trace of his team there either, of course—and decides to check on his sector and see if the guards are still in the same locations. Maybe if he plays it right he can draw one out, then use him to find his partners. When he turns the corner, though, he finds them all milling around outside the chemical building, which is now completely lit up from within.

 _Fuck_.

It seems almost a certainty that the organization has Gaby and Napoleon, and that they’re holding them in the same building where Illya had seen them brought before. The problem remains, though, that there is only one of Illya and at least twenty armed guards outside the building, plus some unknown number within. The good news is that they don’t seem to know he’s there, or if they do they aren’t searching for him.

Most of the guards are focused around the front of the building, and he finds when he goes around the back that the rear is nearly deserted. Perhaps because there are only a few windows high off the ground, not that this would stop Illya. He manages to silently knock out the two guards posted there, leaving them slumped against the back wall, and with a small hop his fingers find purchase on the window ledge.

Carefully, he pulls himself up high enough to peer inside and confirm his suspicions: Gaby and Napoleon are bound, kneeling on the concrete floor, as the man giving orders paces in front of them. They don’t look drugged, not like Illya had been, but they clearly put up a fight, because there is a purple bruise blooming over one side of Napoleon’s face and Gaby is sporting a split lip. A few guards are posted nearby, watching the only door and not, thankfully, the windows. Before he can see much more, the man turns toward his window and he has to drop back down to avoid being seen.

After a few more moments he decides to risk another look. Fortunately the man is turned away, facing Gaby and Napoleon and apparently speaking to them, though it’s not audible through the glass of the window. Napoleon glares up at him, but Gaby is just staring at the ground. It’s a standard move for her, and it means she’s trying to look frail and unintimidating so the captors will underestimate her. It usually works like a charm, though Illya gets the feeling these people won’t be as easily fooled.

Illya carefully tries the latch and finds it unlocked, then slowly pushes it open, keeping his eyes fixed on the man’s back. His luck holds for once, and it slides open silently. Their captor seems quite intent on his partners, so Illya takes the opportunity to hoist himself up and halfway through the window in one smooth motion. The movement clearly catches Napoleon’s eye, but Illya can see the moment he realizes what is happening and keeps his gaze moving so as not to attract attention. Their captor doesn’t seem to notice.

“We’ll have your partner in custody soon enough, when he comes for you,” the man tells them. “Whether you are still alive to say your goodbyes is up to you.”

“He wouldn’t be stupid enought to come after us alone,” Napoleon bluffs. “He’s probably halfway down the mountain already, calling for backup.”

In reality, there is no backup. The whole operation had to be kept exceedingly quiet because of political instability in the region, so there would be no helicopters or armored convoys coming to save them. Just Illya.

“Oh no,” the man says, the amusement obvious in his voice. “I assure you, he’s still on the premises. We would know had he left.”

Illya watches the scene from his perch in the frame of the window, knowing that he’ll have to drop nearly half a meter down to the floor. He needs some noise to cover, and when Napoleon’s eyes flick to his for half a second he knows he’ll have it. What he doesn’t expect is for that cover to come via Napoleon trying to lunge toward the man, triggering several guards to rush forward. One slams a rifle butt across Napoleon’s face while another kicks him in the gut, and Napoleon doubles over, spitting blood onto the concrete floor in front of him.

“Solo!” Gaby shouts, which is somewhat disconcerting because it means that the man must already know their real names.

In the commotion, Illya drops to the floor and quickly hides in the deep shadows thrown by the lab benches. The man is saying something to Napoleon again, but Illya tunes them out, watching the guards intently. Their hands are on their weapons but they’re clearly not ready to fire, and Illya knows he would have enough time to take them out before they could get a shot off. What he doesn’t know is what the man in charge would do, nor how long it would take the guards outside to respond. He needs to get his partners free, but the distance between he would need to cover is too great.

He takes a few calculated risks and gets closer, until he knows he’s just going to have to make his move. The adrenaline thrumming through his body doesn’t quite muffle the pain that still lingers in his knees, nor the exhaustion that weighs heavily on him, but he doesn’t have many options. Four soft pops from his silenced handgun, and the four guards inside the building drop, but some of his shots don’t exactly find their marks. One of the guards manages a spray of rifle fire in Illya’s direction that he just avoids, and rapidly all hell breaks loose.

Illya expected guards from outside to rush through the single door, and he expected that any guards he didn’t fatally wound might try to get shots off at him. What he did not expect is for the man in charge to also have a gun, somehow hidden from sight. He did not expect for the man to grin as he pulls it and points it at Napoleon’s chest, and he did not expect him to simply pull the trigger instead of threatening to do so in order to take them all captive.

Everything seems to happen in slow motion, then. Illya hears himself scream Napoleon’s name as his partner slumps forward. Gaby lurches to the side, away from the gun, trying to get her feet under her with her hands still bound behind her back. The man twists away with what seems like too much speed when Illya fires at him, or maybe it’s just that his shots go wild. Illya feels something thud into his shoulder, just below his collarbone, and when he looks down there seems to be a rather large amount of thick liquid soaking through his black shirt.

 _Must have hit an artery_ , he thinks distantly as conciousness rapidly slips away from him. He doesn’t feel himself hit the ground.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please don't worry, remember it's a time loop! 😆 Also if you are chomping at the bit for Napollya goodness, I promise it's coming.


	3. No 24. You’re Not Making Any Sense

Illya wakes to the sounds and smells of Napoleon in the kitchen. For a moment he just lies in his bed, staring at the ceiling and thinking. Remembering the past two days that seem to have existed only in his mind. Whatever this _thing_ is, it seems to affect only him. For some reason the whole idea seems less terrifying this morning.

He hears Napoleon hum quietly to himself and suddenly remembers hearing that the previous morning as well, not long before he burns his hand. Illya pushes himself up in the bed and winces at a pain in his shoulder, which he supposes is to be expected. As he walks toward the kitchen he pulls down the collar of his shirt and sees a small pink starburst under his right collarbone. It looks exactly like an old gunshot scar, but it certainly wasn’t there yesterday. On the plus side, his knees don’t hurt and there are no abrasions on his wrists.

“Something wrong, Peril?” Napoleon asks, cocking an eyebrow.

Illya carefully covers the scar and reaches out to grab Napoleon’s wrist just as he is reaching for the handle of the pan. “It’s hot, Cowboy.”

“Oh,” Napoleon says, blinking at him in surprise. “Thanks. How did you…?”

Illya shrugs, snatching a chunk of cheese off the counter before he turns around to head to the bathroom. “Just a guess.”

Gaby still isn’t up by the time he returns to the kitchen, and Illya thinks that he should probably go nudge her awake. Then again, maybe not; maybe they shouldn’t go up the mountain today. Maybe he should try to convince his partners they need more intel before attempting the infiltration.

He watches Napoleon flip the omlet, still humming softly as he works, and in his mind’s eye he sees his partner slump forward after being shot nearly point-blank in the chest. A tremor runs down his spine, setting off something sour in his stomach. Fear.

“I’m reliving the same day over again,” he says abruptly, then clarifies, “today.”

Napoleon freezes momentarily, then turns slowly around to look at Illya. “What do you mean, reliving the same day?”

“I’ve been here twice before,” Illya explains, knowning how it sounds. “Well, not exactly here. Before you burned your hand on the pan.”

“I did?” Napoleon asks skeptically.

“Yes,” Illya confirms. “We go up to the compound, but it is some kind of trap. Get captured, or… killed. And then I wake up here again.”

“Peril, you’re not making any sense,” his partner laughs, but uneasily.

Illya should have known it would go like this. He did know, really, but he hoped nonetheless. He could try to explain more, maybe show Napoleon the new scar, but he has a feeling it won’t make a difference. If he’s going to convince Napoleon that he’s not crazy, he’s going to have to do it another way.

“Guess it was just a bad dream,” he says nonchalantly before he disappears back into the other part of the house to go wake Gaby.

* * *

Napoleon doesn’t bring up Illya’s odd revelation again, but he certainly watches Illya closely the entire day. _Of course_ Illya can’t convince them not to split up at the compound, because that is how they planned it, and he can’t provide any good reason that they shouldn’t other than the fact that he _knows_ it will end badly. But if he tries to play that card his partners will just look at him like he’s nuts, so Illya just resigns himself to trying to work around it.

He already knows what’s in his sector, so this time when his partners head out he waits for a second and then quietly follows. Unfortunately he has to choose one of them, there’s no way around it, and on impulse he follows Napoleon. Maybe it’s because of how the previous iteration ended. Even though Napoleon is here, now, in front of him, Illya can still feel the sour pang of fear sitting like a stone in the pit of his stomach.

He sees the moment that a pair of guards close in behind Napoleon, as if they had known he was going to be there. Illya watches them until they get close, making sure that no others are waiting in the wings, and then he strikes, taking out both men with rapid, precise blows.

“Peril, what the hell?” Napoleon hisses as he spins around to stare at Illya, who’s currently standing over the two bodies.

“A trap,” Illya murmurs, barely audible. He doesn’t meet Napoleon’s shocked gaze. “We need to go get Gaby.”

It still doesn’t fucking _work_. Napoleon survives, but Gaby is the one that faces the mystery man’s wrath, and Illya takes a bullet in the neck trying to save her. At least it’s a fast death.

* * *

It doesn't seem to matter if he follows Gaby or Napoleon, doesn’t seem to matter whether or not he tells them to watch out at just the right moments, doesn’t seem to matter if he goes to take out the guards in the exact locations he knows they will be waiting. One or both of his partners inevitably get captured. Illya inevitably gets killed trying to save them. Usually shot, but he’s been stabbed a few times, strangled once (hiding the mark that the garotte had left on his neck from his partners the next day had been more than a little difficult), and, on one bizarre occasion, drowned in ethyl alcohol.

His own deaths mean nothing to him, in the end. Not like watching Gaby and Napoleon die. For some reason Napoleon dies more frequently than Gaby does, maybe because he’s more likely to do stupid, heroic shit that draws attention to him.

The very worst ones are the ones where Napoleon gets himself killed trying to save _Illya_. Damn him.

Twelve loops in, and he feels himself starting to crack around the edges. He’s not sure how much more he can take, but he also has no idea how to stop this godforsaken loop. Maybe if he could keep both of his partners alive. Maybe if he could take down the mysterious man in charge. Maybe if he could live through the night. It’s just that he somehow he hasn’t even managed two at once, much less all three, although to be fair he hasn’t been willing to try any scenerios where he succeeds at taking out their mark but one of his partners dies. It would hardly be an acceptable outcome under normal circumstances, and even less so when he has the chance to reset and try again.

He’s missing something important, he knows he is. Perhaps if he tries something _completely_ different.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A bit of a shorter chapter this time, now we're getting into the middle of the loop. I can promise you more relationship stuff in tomorrow's chapter, now that Illya is going to start _experimenting_ lol.


	4. No. 25: Ringing Ears

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A bit of softness, a bit of angst, and oh yeah, a bit of whump. Happy whumptober? 😂

The next morning, Illya doesn’t save Napoleon from burning his hand on the pan. He feels bad, even though it’s not _his_ fault that his partner is too stupid to use a mitt, but he needs the additional excuse. His left shin is aching already as he lies in bed, thanks to the fact that the bone had been shattered in the previous iteration, and he hopes that the combination of his inevitable limp and Napoleon’s injury is enough to convince his team to put off the operation for a day.

Illya desperately needs a break, and this loop he’s going to damn well get it.

Napoleon is predictably holding his burned hand under the tap when Illya hobbles out into the kitchen. He does a double take at Illya’s gait, brow furrowing in confusion.

“What happened, Peril?”

Illya waves him off as he limps toward the bathroom to get the medical kit. “Old injury acting up.”

It’s a weak lie, but Napoleon doesn’t call him on it. From the bathroom, Illya hears Gaby sarcastically ask if they’re being attacked and then huff at Napoleon’s answer before she returns to her room. He carries the medical supply bag out to the kitchen, setting it on the counter next to the sink before wordlessly grabbing Napoleon’s hand from under the tap and pulling it toward him.

“Peril—” Napoleon starts, but whatever he was going to say is cut off by a hiss as Illya gently dabs the water off his hand with a towel.

“Cheap pans, Cowboy,” Illya murmurs. He grabs the burn cream and a roll of gauze, then carefully applies the cream to the angry red welt on Napoleon’s palm. “You should use a mitt.”

“Little late for that,” Napoleon huffs quietly, an odd note in his voice.

Illya glances up and finds Napoleon watching him work closely. There’s a faint flush of pink dusting his cheekbones, which _could_ just be a reaction to the burn. Of course, the fact that his eyes drop and the blush deepens when Illya catches him staring seems to be a mark against that.

It’s certainly not what Illya expected. They’ve patched each other up more than a few times over the past year, in safe houses and hotels, with everything from full med kits to bandages torn from their clothing. He doesn’t know why bandaging a burned hand should be different, except perhaps that Illya’s assistance isn’t strictly necessary.

Well, it’s not important. Illya finishes wrapping the gauze around Napoleon’s hand and tapes it securely, but then, for some reason, he just… doesn’t let go. Nor does Napoleon withdraw his hand.

This is how Gaby finds them when she re-emerges, geared up for the day. “Is it bad?” she asks, and the sudden interruption makes them both jerk backwards.

“It’s not good,” Illya says, even as Napoleon asserts the opposite. He busies himself packing up the medical supplies, trying not to think about what had passed between them moments before. “I think we should put off the op.”

Gaby’s eyebrows shoot up at this, because Illya is always the last person on the team toadvise moderation. If he’s lucky, that will work to his advantage.

“I’m _fine_ ,” Napoleon protests, “it’s not even my dominant hand.”

“You are injured, and I am… not at my best,” Illya grits out. “It is not worth the risk.”

It’s hard for him to admit, even now. Years of training and discipline scream at him to push through the pain, and the terrible part is that he knows he _could_ , but he just doesn’t want to. Doesn’t want to climb the mountain today. Doesn’t want to watch his teammates die. If that makes him weak—if that makes him a bad agent—then so be it.

He hobbles back to the bathroom to sell his point, and when he returns Gaby and Napoleon are talking quietly. They both look up at him, clearly concerned, and he suspects that his somewhat dramatic shift in temperment is more worrying to them than his unexplained limp.

“Ok,” Gaby says with a small nod. “We agree. We’ll put it off until tomorrow.”

Illya drops heavily into a chair at the small table in the kitchen, barely able to hold back his sigh of relief. “Good.” He looks up at Napoleon and arcs an eyebrow expectantly. “Breakfast?”  
  


* * *

Illya doesn’t know the last time he had such a pleasant day, which is really saying something considering the circumstances. Illya reads the book he carries on missions but never really gets a chance to dive into and plays several games of chess against himself. He even manages to rope Napoleon into a few games, when he can convince him to take a break from messing around in the kitchen. Gaby digs a phonograph and some old 78s out of a closet and puts them on while she takes the opportunity to paint her toenails.

As night falls, Illya cannot help but wonder what will happen when the day ends. Will the loop reset when he falls asleep? Will the fact that they have all survived somehow break the cycle? He finds himself getting wound tighter the later it gets, and he knows his partners can tell.

He should have fucking known it wouldn’t be that easy.

They’re all crammed in the the kitchen after dinner, Illya washing the dishes as Gaby dries them. Napoleon is still sitting at the dinner table, nursing his glass of wine while he hems and haws over what dessert he should make, because _of course_ he’s going to make one.

“This is wholly unnecessary, Cowboy,” Illya tells him. “We don’t need dessert.”

Napoleon scoffs at him. “It’s not about _need_ , Peril. What if things go south tomorrow? Wouldn’t you want to have had one last dessert?”

Illya has to suppress a shudder and falls silent, not quite trusting himself to speak. If only they knew. His partners, however, don’t seem to notice.

“If it makes you happy, do it,” Gaby tells Napoleon. Done drying, she shakes out the towel and hangs it back on the hook. “I, for one, will never turn down a Solo dessert.”

Napoleon finishes his wine and stands up from the table, walking to the oven to turn it on. “See? _Someone_ appreciates my work.”

Illya hums, frowning. Is that what Napoleon thinks? That Illya doesn’t appreciate his work? Something in him wants to protest, to tell his partner that of course he appreciates him, but what comes out of his mouth instead is, “Don’t burn yourself again.”

This nets him an eye roll, but Gaby laughs as she leaves the kitchen. “You two, play nice,” she scolds. “I’m going to go shower, and I expect something delicious when I’m done.”  
  
“At your service, my dear,” Napoleon says with an exaggerated bow, grinning broadly. Then he turns toward Illya and points a finger at him, eyebrows waggling. “And _you_ , I’ll thank you to leave my kitchen if you’re just going to be a grump. See if you get any dessert from me, with that attitude.”

Illya just stares at him, momentarily lost in thought. Watching him here, laughing and joking, it’s almost possible to believe that the day that Illya has been reliving really is nothing more than a long nightmare. The ache in his shin has almost faded away, and if he can still picture Napoleon’s multiple deaths, it now feels that the memories could ebb to nothing if given enough time.

“Cowboy…” he starts, but immediately hesitates. He doesn’t quite know what he wants to say; there are too many thoughts and feelings crowding his throat, and he can barely make sense of them. Napoleon looks at him expectantly, pausing in gathering his ingredients, and Illya sighs. “Have fun making dessert.”

Napoleon smiles at him, bright and open, and something uncomfortably warm blooms deep in Illya’s chest. “Why, thank you Peril,” he says. “I will.”

His partner starts humming as soon as Illya leaves the kitchen, immediately lost in his cooking, and Illya shoves his hands deep in his pants pockets as he shuffles down the hall. The warm feeling hasn’t left him, and a small smile plays on his lips. He’s more than a little glad that no one is currently around to see it.

He’s halfway down the hall when he hears a beep. It’s quiet, and probably means nothing more than the oven is done preheating, but as soon as he thinks that he knows with a deep, unsettling certainty that it’s not true.

“Napoleon!” he yells as he whips around and sprints back toward the kitchen.

He just makes it to the doorframe when the entire kitchen explodes. The blast blows him backward and into the wall on the far side of the hallway, knocking all the air from his lungs. He collapses to the floor, gasping and choking on dust and smoke, but he almost immediately pushes himself unsteadily to his feet. There are numerous cuts all over his body from the shrapnel, and he slips on his own blood pooling on the ground as he tries desperately to get into the kitchen.

What he finds when he gets through the door is nothing short of horrifying. There is a giant hole in the side of the house, open to the outside, and very little left of the counters, cabinets, and appliances. Planks of wood litter the ground, and he pulls them frantically to the side, looking for some sign of his partner.  
  
“Napoleon!” he yells, over and over again. His ears are ringing so loudly he can hardly hear his own voice, so it’s probably pointless given that Napoleon was even closer to the blast than he was. If Napoleon is even still alive.

Finally he catches sight of a bit of Napoleon’s shirt under the debris and yanks what appears to be a chunk of countertop off his body. Miraculously, Napoleon groans when he does, his limbs moving weakly as he apparently tries to push himself up.

“Don’t move, Cowboy,” Illya tells him, falling to his knees next to his partner. “You’re ok, you’re ok.”

Almost immediately he knows it’s a lie. There is a large, twisted hunk of metal sticking out of Napoleon’s side, and he is rapidly losing a large amount of blood. Without really thinking, Illya gathers Napoleon into his arms and presses one hand futilely to the wound. Thick, dark blood oozes between his fingers, and Napoleon coughs wetly.

“Peril,” he groans, just audible over the ringing in Illya’s ears. His eyes are screwed closed in pain, but his hands find Illya’s arms and cling with surprising strength. “What…?”  
  
“Shhh,” Illya hushes him, “it was a trap, Cowboy. They knew we were here.”

Napoleon winces and shakes his head like he can’t believe this information. Illya, unfortunately, can believe it far too readily.

“Gaby,” Napoleon coughs, “where…?”

“I don’t know,” Illya admits. She should have been across the house in the bathroom, presumably, so maybe she’s ok, but she also hasn’t appeared yet. Then again, he has no idea how much time has actually passed, or if there’s a clear path to the kitchen anymore.

“You should go. Find her,” Napoleon manages past another groan, although his grip on Illya doesn’t weaken. “Leave me. M’not gonna make it anyway.”

Illya shakes his head, though Napoleon’s eyes are still closed. “No, Cowboy. No,” he insists. “You’ll be fine. It’s not bad.”  
  
Napoleon actually smiles at that, and his eyes flutter open. Blue eyes, stormy as the ocean, full of pain and fear and something else more difficult to name. “You’re a terrible liar, Peril.”

“I’m not leaving you. Not this time.”

“Oh, Peril,” Napoleon sighs through a shaky breath, and even through the ringing Illya can hear emotion thickening his voice.

One of his hands releases Illya’s wrist and he reaches up to grab behind Illya’s neck, pulling him down until their foreheads meet. Illya breath shudders through his chest, and abruptly he realizes there are tears streaking down his cheeks. Somehow, in all the previous iterations of the day, they never had a final moment like this. The deaths were always too fast, which should be a blessing, but now, as Napoleon’s nose brushes his, it doesn’t feel that way.

“Illya,” Napoleon breathes into the space between them. “You should know—” he breaks off, wincing in pain again. His grip loosens slightly and Illya pulls back to look at him, but not very far.

“Don’t,” Illya whispers. “Napoleon—”

“No, let me,” Napoleon says, and when he opens his eyes again they are full of determination. He laughs through a wet cough, shaking his head. “This is horribly selfish of me, I know, but… I need to say it. I was too much of a coward to do it before, and I can’t die that way.” He breaks off after this rather impressive amount of speaking and takes a couple of shaking breaths that wrack his chest.

“You’re not a coward,” Illya insists. “You’re the bravest person I know. Believe me, I’ve seen you die so many times now. Stupid, stupid, brave Cowboy.”

Napoleon furrows his brow at Illya, momentarily bewildered by this assertion. “What?”

Whatever Napoleon had been about to tell him, Illya doesn’t get to hear it. The _ratatat_ of gunfire shatters the air around them. Somewhere nearby, Gaby must be returning fire, based on the sound of the shooting.

Illya doesn’t see the merceneries entering the gaping hole in the side of the kitchen. He doesn’t feel the bullets. All he can focus on is the man bleeding out in his arms as Illya cups a bloody hand to his pale cheek.

All he can think is, _what were you going to say?_

* * *

Illya is out of bed only moments after he wakes, immediately shoving gear into his duffle bag. He clears his room in record time and only pauses for a moment to bang on Gaby’s door before rushing to the kitchen. Napoleon is no doubt looking at him with a supremely confused expression, but that is honestly par for the course these days. Illya doesn’t even glance at him as he packs up what little gear is in the kitchen.

“We have to leave. _Now_. Go pack your gear. And don’t touch the pan handle.”

He blows out of the door and down the hall before Napoleon can reply. There isn’t much in the living room, but there are a few weapons laid out in preparation for the day’s planned op. They go haphazardly into bags and cases. Right now, he doesn't really care. Illya spins around, checking the room for anything he might have missed, and sees Gaby and Napoleon gaping at him from the doorway.

“Why are you just standing there?” he demands. “You need to pack up.”  
  
“Illya, wait. Stop,” Napoleon says, and he’s using that _tone_ again, the gentle, cautious one that colors his voice whenever Illya is on the verge of losing control.

He’s _not_ losing control, not this time. But he’s certainly aware that it looks that way. Illya growls in frustration and makes to push past them, because if they won’t pack then he will do it _for_ them.

Gaby catches his arm, and he allows himself to be halted, if only for a second. “What’s going on? What’s wrong?” she asks.

“This is a trap. All of it. They know we are coming tonight. They know we are _here_ , in this safehouse. We have to get out of here, _now_.”

Gaby and Napoleon look at each other, and some nonverbal discussion passes between them in an instant.

“How…?” Napoleon says, shaking his head in confusion. “There haven’t been any messages since we got here. Did Waverly contact you some other way?”

Illya snarls in frustration. “Look, I can’t tell you how I know. I just know. The mission is compromised. Do you trust me?”

“Illya—” Gaby starts.

“ _Do you trust me?_ ”

“Of course we do, Peril,” Napoleon answers, and Gaby nods her agreement. “We trust you.”

“Good. Then let’s go.”

They’re ambushed not far outside the small mountain village by a large contingent of armed men who very clearly came from the compound. Illya even recongizes some of them, at this point. He swears, and sighs, and waits to wake up again.

* * *

It takes six more loops and exhausting every possible exit route out of the area for him to fully realize there is no way they will get off this mountain by running. In every loop, he tries not to think about what happened in the kitchen after the explosion. Getting them out of this terrible situation takes first priority in his head, and he can’t let himself get distracted.

It weighs on him anyway, though. Every time Napoleon speaks to him gently when he thinks Illya is losing it, every time his partner throws himself in the path of the bullets when they’re ambushed. He can’t get the look in Napoleon’s eyes out of his head, nor the sound of the emotion in his voice.

But. A way out of this loop first, and then he’ll let himself think about it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Confused yet? 😅 I promise finally some answers in the next chapter! And just maybe Illya reconsiders his position on "thinking about it".
> 
> Thanks so much for reading!!


	5. No. 26: Concussion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for this chapter: implied suicide. Only a very brief mention of it, and definitely no details of any kind. I think you can probably guess the context of this given the nature of the story. I will say that the latter half of this chapter is very warm and fluffy, so I'm not leaving you in a dark place.

Illya’s not sure how he does it, but he manages to wake up hours before dawn. The safehouse is dead silent, and his partners will be asleep for a while yet. As quickly and as quietly as he can, he arms himself with every possible weapon he can strap to his body and throws extra ammunition and some random bits of portable food into a small backpack.

He practically runs up the mountain, covering the distance in less than half the amount of time it normally takes them. The forest is pitch black around him, but he doesn’t need to see where he’s going. He knows it in his bones, by this point.

The sun is just peeking over the horizon when he arrives at the compound. He doesn’t cut his way in, because he’s sure there’s some kind of silent alarm that gets triggered, and instead finds a tree that’s been allowed to grow too close to the fence. It’s not the easiest climb, but he makes it high enough to launch himself over the fence, tucking into a roll as he lands on the other side.

It’s odd, seeing the compound in the daylight. Somehow it looks just as deserted as it is at night, like it’s only ever staffed by a skeleton crew of guards. He knows better than to let himself get lulled into a false sense of security, though. There must be some hidden part of the compound that he hasn’t discovered yet, underground perhaps, somewhere the mysterious man in charge hides out. Somehow Illya has never seen him until someone has gotten captured, but he can’t possibly just appear out of _nothing_.

Illya finds a lone guard about his height and knocks him out, quickly stripping him down in a storeroom. His uniform is a bit tight on Illya, but it’s not too noticeable. Concealing his weapons as best he can, Illya pulls the guard’s cap low over his eyes and steps back out into the facility.

He should have done this ages ago, he thinks almost idly as he wanders freely through the compound. He learns a lot more about their targets, understands a lot more about the facility, and his partners are safe. Well, he doesn’t _know_ that they’re safe. He has no idea what they’re doing, to be honest, but at least this time he can pretend.

If there is an entrance to some underground bunker, it remains stubbornly hidden. Illya has poured over nearly every inch of the compound, and so eventually he returns to the chemical building. He’d been avoiding it, in part because of the bad memories and in part because it always feels like a trap. Then again, maybe it feels that way because it’s where the information he actually needs is kept.

The building is empty, as it always seems to be. Illya finds a high, secluded perch on a nearby building and watches for a long time, hoping to see some sign of activity, but there’s nothing. He briefly wonders if the reason that no one seems to be around is because they are in the process of attacking the safehouse, but he pushes the thought from his mind.

Eventually he climbs down from his perch and creeps into the building. It’s a familiar space at this point, given that most of the loops seem to end with them dying there, but most of the times he’s there he’s too busy to really look around. To wit, this time he finds a door hidden along one wall, partially obstructed from view by lab benches and equipment. The lock on it is strange and high-tech, like nothing he’s ever seen before, and he wishes Napoleon were here. He’d probably be able to crack it no problem.

Illya spends a long time trying to figure out the door. Long enough that he is, finally, lulled into a false sense of security. Surely if they knew he was here, they would have acted by now. He’s considering putting some charges down and trying to just blow his way through the door, when the day finally catches up with him.

He hears the footstep behind him too late. Turns too slowly to defend himself. After all of the myriad ways he’s been attacked, it seems almost absurd that this time he’s taken out by nothing more than some kind of heavy club that smacks hard into his temple and makes him see stars before everything goes black.

* * *

The thing is, it doesn’t kill him.

Illya wakes in a cell. The floor is cold, damp concrete underneath him, and even though the air isn’t particularly cool, it chills him to his bones. When he tries to open his eyes he sees there is a high, barred window letting a sliver of light in, but even that is too much for him. He winces and rolls onto his side, pushing himself up just enough to heave out what little is in his stomach before collapsing to the ground again.

Fuck. He hasn’t been concussed this badly in a long time. He forces his eyes open again and the world spins around him, but he can’t just lie here. He has to find some way out. Unfortunately his efforts to move end with him dry heaving again, and he curls reflexively into a ball. Maybe in a bit, then.

“So nice to finally meet you, Mr. Kuryakin,” a familiar voice says, some unknown amount of time later.

Illya pries his eyes open to see—who else?—the mysterious man in charge standing outside his cell. A small smile plays on his lips, mocking and smug, as he surveys Illya where he still lies on the floor of the cell.

“You look to be in pretty rough shape, there,” he says lightly. “Sorry for the rude welcome, but, you see, my boys can get a bit carried away sometimes.”  
  
“Fuck you,” Illya manages, spitting the taste of bile out of his mouth.

The man laughs at this. “Ah, there’s the spirit I was expecting. You surprised us today, Mr. Kuryakin. Did you know that?”  
  
“Just kill me and be done with it.”

Silence falls heavy in the air, and when Illya looks up again the man is staring at him with a calculating expression on his face.

“You’re the one resetting the day, aren’t you?”

It is perhaps the very last thing that Illya thought he would hear. Surprise chokes him and he erupts in a coughing fit, wincing against the blinding pain in his skull.

“I suppose that makes sense,” the man continues, “given all that you seem to know about the facility. Fortunate for us that we caught you, then.”  
  
“What are you talking about?” Illya growls as he tries to force himself to his hands and knees.

“Don’t play dumb. You know what I mean. I don’t know how you stole it from me, but no matter. I’ll get it back shortly.”  
  
“Impossible.”

The man raises his eyebrows questioningly. “Did you never wonder how we always know where your team is, or what you’ll do? I spent fifty loops trying to outsmart you before I lost it. I have to admit, you lot are quite creative. Far more formidable than anyone else who has tried to come take us out. How many loops has it been for you, now? Have you discovered all of our traps?”

Illya doesn’t answer. The idea that he’s nearly thirty loops behind their adversary is staggering. He pushes himself up until he can lean against the wall, ignoring the lurch in his stomach and cursing how his head is at once throbbing and fuzzy.

“How does it work?” he groans eventually. Clearly there’s no use pretending he doesn’t know what the man is talking about. “How does it end?”

“You don’t think I’m going to actually tell you that, do you?” the man laughs. “As to how it ends: don’t worry, there is a cure, so to speak. Once we pull you out, I’ll take the reset back, and your pesky team will finally be eliminated.”

“None of this makes sense,” Illya says. Granted, his mental facilities aren’t at their best right now, but even so he’s pretty sure this is insane. He would never believe it for a second if he hadn’t been living it. “How can some drug do all this? Time doesn’t work that way. Reality doesn’t work that way.”

The man smirks at him. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s not real. Maybe it’s all in your head. Maybe it’s all some elaborate psychological torture to get you to reveal your plans.” He turns, then, and walks toward the door, pausing only for at the threshold to glance back at Illya. “What do you think?”

He leaves Illya alone in the rapidly falling dark of the cell. To be honest, Illya doesn’t know what to think anymore, but for the first time the idea of losing the ability to reset the day is terrifying. What if he gets this ‘cure’, whatever it is, and his partners are already dead? What if this is the day that he loses everything, and there are no redos?

That night, for the first time in this already too-long nightmare, Illya does the unthinkable.

* * *

He wakes up in his bed at the safehouse with the mother of all splitting headaches. The early morning sunlight is just starting to come through the window and it’s already too much. There’s pretty much no way he’s making it up the mountain today, so he might as well stay in bed, but then he hears Napoleon humming and thinks maybe he should _try_ to keep him from burning his hand.

Turns out, trying to push himself out of bed is a mistake. His head swims and he collapses onto all fours with a heavy thud, retching the bile from his empty stomach onto the hardwood.

“Christ, Peril, what’s wrong?” Napoleon gasps as he tears open the door to the room. He rushes forward and bends down at Illya’s side, one hand grabbing his arm while the other rests between his shoulders, rubbing small, comforting circles.

Illya groans and allows himself to be hustled back into the bed, throwing an arm over his eyes against the light. “Can you…” he mutters, gesturing blindly toward the window, and after a moment he hears the blinds shut.

A few moments later the edge of the mattress dips as Napoleon sits down next to him, then a tentative hand brushes over his arm. “Peril, what’s going on?”

“M’sick,” Illya mumbles, because how do you explain that you have a concussion despite the fact that you didn’t actually hit your head?

Illya pulls his arm off his face and squints at his partner in the dim light, and finds Napoleon staring at him with no small amount of care and concern written across his face. He reaches forward and lays his palm gently across Illya’s forehead, presumably checking for a fever, and for some bizarre reason Illya shivers under his touch. It occurs to him, then, that Napoleon didn’t end up burning his hand on the pan after all, and the realization shocks a laugh out of him.

“Well you’re not feverish, but you might be delirious,” Napoleon says wryly. “I don’t know what this is, but you’re obviously going to have to stay back today.”

“ _No!_ ” Illya say sharply, then winces at the volume of his own voice. He clamps Napoleon’s wrist in an iron grip. “You can’t go. You and Gaby, you have to stay too.”

“Come now, Peril, I appreciate the concern, but the two of us can handle a little recon without you.”

“Please, Napoleon,” Illya grits out, clenching his eyes tightly closed, “don’t go. I…” _I need you_ , he can’t quite make himself say. “Don’t go, just for today. For me.”

Illya squeezes Napoleon’s wrist again, and after a moment his partner’s warm palm covers his hand. At that he manages to pry his eyes open again and finds that same worried, careful expression on Napoleon’s face.

“Ok, Peril. Ok,” he agrees. “We’ll put off the op.”

He expects that Napoleon will get up and leave him to his misery, but his partner just sits there, watching him, his hand still covering Illya’s and his thumb absently tracing small circles on Illya’s skin. All at once Illya is thrown back in his memories to the kitchen, to the determination, and something else, in Napoleon’s eyes. It sends another shiver down his spine, which Napoleon apparently interprets as a chill. He pulls away to grab the blanket, and Illya tries to suppress a surge of disappointment at the loss of contact.

“I’ll bring you some breakfast in a bit, hm?” Napoleon says as he pulls the blanket over Illya’s body. He pauses, frowning, and somehow Illya can tell he’s remembering seeing Illya dry-heaving only minutes earlier. “Maybe just some toast.”

“Cowboy,” Illya murmurs, stopping Napoleon before he leaves the room. He turns back expectantly, but once again Illya feels lost for words. He chokes down whatever emotion is clogging his throat and sighs heavily. “Don’t touch the pan handle without a mitt, and don’t turn on the oven.”

* * *

Reading is, unfortunately, not really an option in his current condition, and honestly playing chess isn’t much better. He sleeps a lot of the day, and Gaby plays a some simple card games with him, but he doesn’t see much of Napoleon except for when he comes in to deliver food. Illya tries not to feel disappointed. It doesn’t really work.

He discovers why his partner has been so scarce when he finally gets up in the late afternoon. The injuries he sustains from loop to loop at least have the benefit of healing a lot more quickly than usual, so he feels almost back to normal besides a lingering dull headache. Napoleon is, perhaps predictably, in the kitchen, and he tuts disapprovingly when he sees Illya enter.

“You shouldn’t be up,” he scolds, barely pausing in whatever he’s doing.

Illya ignores him and walks over to investigate. Napoleon’s shirtsleeves are rolled to his elbows and he appears to be kneading some kind of smooth, pale yellow dough.

“You’re not using the oven,” Illya says quickly, his gaze darting toward the appliance, but it appears to still be off.

“No, I’m not,” Napoleon huffs as he kneads, “even though you won’t tell me why. This isn’t for baking. I’m making pasta.”  
  
Illya blinks at him, thinking he must be misunderstanding something. Surely Napoleon isn’t making noodles from scratch in their tiny safehouse kitchen. When would he have even gotten the ingredients to do such a thing? The whole operation seems extravagant, even for Napoleon. His partner is too busy vigorously kneading the dough to notice his confused look, though.

“Why?”

Napoleon laughs. “I can’t very well make my nona’s soup with _dried pasta_ ,” he says, no small amount of disdain lacing his words. “I think she might rise from the grave and beat me over the head with a wheel of parmesan.”

“All right,” Illya allows, like he understands why it would matter, “but why are you making the soup _now_? Here? The circumstances cannot be ideal.”  
  
“Ah, well, it’s her famous get-well soup,” Napoleon explains. He pauses for a moment, still staring down at the pasta dough. “When I was growing up, any time I got sick she would come over and spend all day making this soup. Said it was better than any medicine a doctor could give.”

Momentarily, the dough seems forgotten. Napoleon looks like he’s lost in a pleasant memory, a small, melancholy smile curling the corners of his mouth. The image of a short, round Italian woman taking care of a small boy with dark hair and deep blue eyes forms in Illya’s mind, and he finds himself inexplicably warmed by it.

“And?” Illya prompts. “Is it?”

Napoleon snaps out of his reverie and sets about kneading the dough vigorously again. Illya wonders how he knows when it’s ready, but he doesn’t want to know badly enough to get a lecture on pasta making from Napoleon right now.

“Of course, Peril,” Napoleon says. “Like she always said, it’s got her secret ingredient in it.”

“Which is?”

To his surprise, Napoleon flushes an impressive shade of red at this question. “Wouldn’t be a secret if I went around telling everybody, would it?” he mumbles, barely audible.

Illya lets silence fall between them for a moment, only broken by the soft sounds of kneading. It’s really rather more mesmerizing than it should be, watching the muscles in his forearms move under his skin as he works the dough with strong, capable hands. Napoleon's hair is starting to curl from being in the steamy kitchen all day, a few locks escaping his pomade to fall across his forehead, and the whole picture is rather… arresting.

“You still haven’t answered the question,” he says eventually—and why on Earth does his throat feel so _tight_?—“Why are you making it now?”

“I would have thought that was obvious, Peril,” Napoleon huffs. “You’re sick, you get the soup. Which is also why you really should be in bed.”

He finally looks up at Illya, and his eyes are full of that same _something_ that they had been after the explosion. And then, suddenly, everything seems to fall into place. Napoleon has been in here all day making this soup, the soup that his grandmother made him when he was sick, the soup that you clearly only make for people you love, because _why else_ would anyone spend that much time making _soup_ …

And he’s making it for Illya.

Abruptly Illya really does feel like he needs to go back to bed. Or at least sit down.

“Have you… have you made it many times?” Illya asks quietly, sounding nearly as unsteady as he feels.

Napoleon stares at him for a moment before he drops his gaze to the counter again. “No. No, I haven’t,” he answers, just as quiet. Then he clears his throat, clenching his jaw, and gives his head a tiny shake. “But I know _how_ , if that’s what you’re worried about. It’ll be good.”  
  
“I know it will, Cowboy,” Illya says. “Thank you, for making it for me.”  
  
“Well, you know, it’s something to do while we’re stuck here all day,” Napoleon says dismissively, but it’s too late. Illya happens to know what Napoleon would do all day when stuck in a safehouse, and it’s not making extremely labor-intensive soup. “Now will you go back to bed? You look like you’re about to fall over.”

Illya takes the excuse, even though his fading concussion is certainly not the thing that’s currently making him so lightheaded. Gaby offers to play another card game with him but he begs off, claiming he’s going to nap, when really all he does after he climbs back into the bed is stare at the wall and think.

It would be one thing if the only thing that had clicked into place was Illya’s understanding of Napoleon’s feelings for him. No, that realization had the benefit—or misfortune? who could tell—of seemingly popping the cork on Illya’s own repressed feelings. Of everything he felt, but didn’t dare put a name to, that terrible day in the kitchen, and nearly every other repetition of this miserable loop. Told himself it was loyalty, told himself it was friendship, because good agents simply _do not_ fall in love with their partners.

Turns out he is just as terrible a spy as he’s always accused Napoleon of being.

He’s not even close to done processing all of it by the time Gaby peeks her head into the room and says that dinner is ready, and does he feel up to coming to the table to eat?

He nods and follows her to the kitchen, feeling some kind of perverse comfort in the knowledge that he has, seemingly, all the time in the world to make sense of what’s going on in his heart.

The soup is, without a doubt, the most delicious soup he’s ever tasted. Gaby lets out a groan of delight more suited to the bedroom than the dinner table when she takes a bite and honestly, it’s all Illya can do not to echo her. He’s sure his face does something incriminating nevertheless, because the blistering warmth that fills his chest—warmth that has decidedly nothing to do with the temperature of the soup—is far more than he can reasonably control.

Napoleon, of course, looks exceedingly pleased with himself, but whatever emotions that had slipped loose earlier have been carefully locked away again. It doesn’t matter. Between Napoleon’s aborted confession after the explosion and the soup, Illya knows. To be honest, it’s a little embarassing that it took him 22 loops to figure it out, now that he knows where to look for the signs.

A year and 22 loops. God, he’s an idiot sometimes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahhhh feelings!! Did you guess what the secret ingredient in the soup is? Hint: it's LOVE. 😂 I know, I know, so sappy, but also I feel like it's absolutely something a grandmother would say. The question is, what will Illya do now with his newfound knowledge?? 🤔


	6. No. 27: Power Outage

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahhh I’m late on this chapter, but it’s double length, so hopefully that makes up for it. This one starts out fluffier and then gets pretty excruciatingly angsty, sorrrrrrry. But the conclusion should be up in the next day or two!

Illya does not immediately act on his newfound knowledge. It’s both difficult and easy to convince himself to focus on the mission, because although he really wants nothing more than to take a break—he’s been running this op for nearly a month at this point, after all—and take some time to think about whatever this _thing_ is between him and Napoelon, he knows the best way to do that is to end this. Taking ‘rest days’ at the safehouse only goes so far when they’re guaranteed to always end in disaster. Most of the loops still feature one or both of his partners’ deaths, and it never gets any easier to deal with.

So he tries to push the feelings back out of his mind and focus on what he needs to do instead of what he wants. What he _needs_ to be doing is learning more about their targets and trying to come up with some way of finally ending all of this. After all, he is still far behind his adversary in the number of loops he’s had to figure this out. As far as he knows, there are at least twenty more traps they haven’t discovered yet. He likes to think that he won’t need that many more loops to gain the upper hand, but after a few more tries, he finally realizes what he’s missing.

The mysterious man in charge said it himself: it was their _team_ that outsmarted him so many times. Illya is good, but the team is better, and he needs his partners if he’s going to do this. Needs them to really understand the problem at hand. Which is, to put it mildly, _difficult_ when they forget everything each reset. He hadn’t really tried to explain the situation past his first attempt, but now he knows he’s going to have to.

It takes another three loops before he hits on the right combination of uncanny knowledge, plausible explanations, and entreaties to _just trust him_. Even then his partners don’t look totally convinced, but they do become more willing to play along. And then, on the fourth loop, he somewhat accidentally discovers a completely unexpected and surprisingly effective way of convincing Napoleon, at the very least.

“So wait, how many loops has it been? Twenty-five?” Napoleon asks, arms crossed over his chest as he leans back against the counter in the kitchen. He’s wearing a look that’s unmistakably skeptical but also like he’s trying to be open minded, and Illya really does appreciate the effort.

Illya nods. “Approximately.”

“And we never remember anything?”  
  
“I think the fact that you are asking that question is answer enough, no?” Illya replies, arcing an eyebrow at him.

“I guess so,” Napoleon allows. He stares at Illya for a long moment, critical and considering, and Illya has a brief uncomfortable feeling that something about his bearing has changed. Honestly he would be surprised if it hadn’t, what with all he’s been through, but now suddenly it feels like Napoleon can sense exactly what it is.

“And all the loops are pretty much the same?” Napoleon asks.  
  
Illya hesistates. In his debriefs he tends to talk only about their attempts on the compound, forgoing much information on the days they’ve stayed at the safehouse. Partly because not much of what happened during them is particularly relevant to the mission, and partly because of the can of worms it threatens to open inside him if he spends too much time thinking about them. But this is the first time Napoleon has directly asked, and something in him pushes him to talk about it.

“Not entirely,” he says cagily. “We’ve stayed back here a couple of times, when my lingering injuries were too severe.”

“How did those days end?”

Illya frowns. “Poorly. The oven is somehow rigged to blow, as is the fireplace. Probably more places, too.”

Napoleon is silent again as he seems to absorb this information. “You really die at the end of every day?”  
  
“You do too, on most of them.”

Napoleon winces at that, but Illya knows he’s not thinking about his own deaths, not really. He’s putting himself in Illya’s shoes, imagining what it would be like. “I don’t know how you can take it, Peril.”

“No choice,” Illya mutters.

“Yeah, I get that, it’s just… watching you _die_ , over and over again—” Napoleon’s words bite off as he looks at the ground, and it’s clear that the emotions he keeps so carefully guarded are threatening to escape again.

Illya takes a few steps forward, bringing him within arm’s reach of Napoleon, and it makes his partner look up at him with wide eyes. Eyes full of an emotion that Illya can quite easily read, now. Probably he shouldn’t say anything, but then again, why not? Napoleon won’t remember any of it tomorrow. Which is painful in its own way, but at least Illya knows that if things go poorly, he has another shot.

“The day the oven blew,” he says quietly, “you were dying in my arms. You said… you said you wanted to tell me something. Said you were too much of a coward to tell me before.”

“Did I?” Napoleon whispers, looking somewhat stricken. “Did I… tell you?”  
  
Illya shakes his head gently. “No. Didn’t get a chance.”  
  
“Oh. Good,” he says, breathing out a shaky sigh of relief. “I mean, not _good_ , really, but I don’t know what I was going to say—”

“I know, Cowboy,” Illya interrupts.

He reaches forward to take Napoleon’s hand, lacing their fingers togther like he’s wanted to do for _days_ now, and suddenly trying to suppress this just feels stupid. Napoleon’s palm is sweaty in his panic, but it doesn’t matter, because his hand is so _right_ in Illya’s. He can’t quite stop a tiny smile from curling the corners of his mouth.

“Y–you do?” Napoleon stammers, his blue eyes wide with disbelief and fear and unmistakable _hope_.

Illya nods and leans forward to press his lips to Napoleon’s. It causes his partner to stiffen in surprise for a fleeting moment, but then he rapidly seems to melt, lips parting when Illya brings his other hand up to cup Napoleon’s jaw and slides his tongue along his bottom lip. With a slight tip of his head, Illya fits their mouths perfectly together, then smiles into the kiss when the movement elicits a tiny noise of pleasure from Napoleon.

The last few days Illya had, perhaps unsurprisingly, imagined various scenerios in which he’d lost his carefully maintained control and ended up kissing Napoleon during a loop, but most of them had been a desperate crush of lips as one of them was dying, tinged with blood and sorrow. Certainly none of them had been like this, gentle and unhurried, Napoleon almost trembling in his arms with the pure emotion of it.

When they eventually part Napoleon is flushed and breathing hard, and who would have believed that, of the two of them, _he_ would be the one so flustered by this development? Illya gives his hand a small squeeze and receives one in return, and then Napoleon’s mouth splits into a wide grin.

“Is that—” he starts, breaking off with a huffed laugh. “Is that the first time we’ve… done that?”  
  
“Yes,” Illya answers as he brushes his thumb lightly over Napoleon’s cheek. “First time.”  
  
“So, uh, how _did_ you know, if I— if I didn’t say anything that day…”  
  
Illya bites his lower lip against the smug smile he knows is fighting its way onto his face. “One loop, I was sick. Recovering from a concussion, actually, but you didn’t know that. You made me your grandmother’s soup.”  
  
“Oh,” Napoleon breathes, flushing red again. “I see. Told you all about it, then?”  
  
“Mmhm,” Illya hums.

Napoleon drops his eyes again, muttering under his breath. “Real smooth, Napoleon.”

“I’m glad you did,” Illya tells him. He nudges Napoleon’s chin up until his partner meets his eyes. “And not just because the soup was delicious.”

Napoleon laughs, then, and shakes his head lightly. “I gotta tell you, hearing that is almost more convincing than anything else you’ve said today, because there’s no way you could know about that or… or what it means. But you do. It’s insane, but somehow you do.”

“You really believe me now?”  
  
“Yeah, Peril,” Napoleons says sincerely. “I believe you.” Then his lips curl into a mischevious grin. “You know, just a suggestion for the future, but you could maybe _lead_ with that—”

Illya cuts him off with another long, lingering kiss before he pulls back again. “You’re just saying that so you get kissed earlier in the day,” he accuses.

“So what if I am? I think I’m allowed to look out for my future self. Or is it past self? I have to say, this is all very confusing, Peril.”

Illya sighs. “Tell me about it.”

Napoleon might have a point, though.

* * *

Turns out, the fastest and most convincing way to introduce the concept of his looping days to his partner is to walk into the kitchen, grab Napoleon’s hand before he burns it on the hot pan, and pull him into a vigorous kiss. Every time, Napoleon freezes in pure shock for what should be a surprisingly short amount of time before he just… goes with it, opening up and chasing Illya’s mouth with no small amount of enthusiasm. It would be almost comical, especially after the whole thing has been repeated several times, if it didn’t make Illya’s heart thunder in his chest every. damn. time.

Sure, it confuses the hell out of Napoleon, but he’s far more ready to believe that Illya is actually repeating the day when Illya knows _just how_ to kiss him in a way that makes his toes curl (his words). By the time Gaby is awake, Napoleon is already completely in his corner, which makes convincing her a lot easier too.

And hell, it’s not a bad way to start the day, especially if you’re going to have to start the same one over and over again.

Unfortunately, that is typically where the romance starts and ends for them on any given day. That’s not to say that they don’t steal kisses during the rare quiet moments, and Gaby is pretty much guaranteed to roll her eyes and throw pebbles at them on the hike up the mountain. But the days are still packed with trying to figure out how to evade the traps and take out their targets, and if Illya sometimes feels like taking a break all he has to do is picture any one of his partners’ myriad deaths.

One morning, they’re all hunched around the map of the compound, watching as Illya adds every trap that they’ve managed to trigger so far to it, as he does every day. He talks through everything he knows, and everything they’ve tried. So far the door he’d found on his solo jaunt remains unopened; even when they’ve successfully gotten there a few times, they’ve always been ambushed before Napoleon could figure out how to open it.

“What about the power?” Gaby asks as she stares pensively down the map. “Have we tried taking it out?”

Illya shakes his head. “No. The substation is hidden somewhere else on the mountain, but I’ve never been able to investigate it.”

“You say the lock on the door has some kind of electronic component?” Napoleon asks.

“Correct.”

“Well, it might have a backup power source, but you never know,” Napoleon muses. “I think cutting the electricity should be our next move.”

It’s surprisingly not that hard to follow the electrical lines to a substation sunk into the mountainside. Which, of course, makes Illya immediately think that it is a trap, but he is surprised again. There are only two guards, and the team takes them out quickly and quietly. The real problem comes in the fact that it will take at minimum fifteen minutes to cover the ground between the substation and the main compound, which is too long. They’re going to need to have one person cut the power when the other two are already in place, so that their targets have no chance to mount a response.

They argue about the distribution of labor, but in the end there is only one option: Napoleon has to go to the compound to crack the lock on the door, and Illya needs to be there because he’s the only one who will remember anything, so that leaves Gaby to kill the power. Illya hates the idea of leaving her alone, because he’ll have no idea if she is in trouble or not, but there’s no way around it. She’ll join them as soon as she can after she does it, and he hopes that at least in some loop he’ll get some confirmation that she’s ok.

Killing the power does disable part of the door lock, but it turns out there is a combination lock underneath, and it takes four loops for Napoleon to discover each number in the combination before they’re cut down by guards.

The minute they actually step foot inside the underground facility Illya knows they are in the right place. He can practically _feel_ it, tingling on his skin. There are cells here—this must be where he’d been held, before—and spaces that look more like medical observation rooms. They move quickly and quietly, trying to search as much of the area as they can before the guards catch up with them. When they’ve gone as far as they can they end up in a well-appointed office, and it _must_ belong to the man in charge, but he is frustratingly not in it. Somewhat unfortunately for them, he is nearby.

Normally the guards in the compound tend to be of the shoot-first-ask-questions-later variety, which works in their favor since it means Illya doesn’t have to worry about not dying. Whenever Illya does something truly unexpected, though, something that has the potential to actually _work_ , it seems to tip off the man in charge. And that? Is not a good thing.

Like this time, when the armed guards that bust into the room just stand there with their guns trained on Illya and Napoleon instead of firing, as if waiting for someone to give the order.

“Now this _is_ a surprise,” the now-familiar tenor croons moments before the man walks through the door. “In my very own office, even.”

Illya and Napoleon trade glances and a silent understanding that it might be useful to get the man talking rather than starting to shoot blindly in the hopes of triggering a new loop. This is, as it turns out, their first mistake.

“I take it one of you is resetting the day,” the man says conversationally, looking at both of them critically. “Given that you made it here. I don’t suppose you’d be so kind as to tell me who it is?”

“‘Fraid not,” Napoleon drawls. “Guess you’ll just have to kill us both.”  
  
The man laughs at this idea, which of course everyone knows is absurd. Killing them is the last thing he’d want to do, now that he has them cornered. He stares at them both for another moment, and Illya _knows_ that nothing shows on either of their faces to give them away, but the man nods anyway.

“Shoot the American, and bring the Russian here,” he says dismissively.

“No!” Illya shouts involuntarily, because that is the one situation that _cannot_ happen, but even as he does he realizes he played right into the man’s game.

So, he does the only thing he can, and starts shooting anyway.

The scuffle ends relatively quickly. Illya takes down several guards before he’s overwhelmed by the sheer number of them in the small space and they force him to his knees as they tie his hands behind his back. As luck would have it, though, Napoleon’s position nearer to the door means he manages to get a gun on the man in charge. He unfortunately does not look that perturbed by this development, but he waves a hand to signal the guards anyway. Several of them have their guns still trained on Napoleon, but at least for the moment they don’t fire.  
  
“Well, you got yourselves a standoff, if that’s what you were hoping for,” the man says. “But I don't think it’s going to work out for you.”

“You think it’s going to work out for _you?_ ” Napoleon scoffs. “Your mercenaries are just that loyal, are they? By my reckoning, I take you out and we go scot free.”

“Oh, Mr. Solo, that is an optimistic viewpoint,” the man replies, grinning cruelly. “My men will, in fact, kill you no matter what. The question is, after you die, who will be here to prevent them from giving your partner the antidote and then killing him? By my reckoning… no one. Something tells me that’s not a sacrifice you’re willing to make, even if you _are_ dead.”

Illya can see realization flicker in Napoleon’s eyes at the truth of this assessment. Gaby won’t arrive in time, and there is no way in hell that Illya will allow the final loop to end with Napoleon’s death. There is only one possible scenerio where they both get out of this.

“Cowboy,” Illya says into the tense silence that fills the room. Napoleon doesn’t look at him, but Illya knows he’s listening all the same. “You know what you have to do.”

“Yeah, right, Peril. I don’t think so. He’s bluffing.”  
  
“He’s not.”

“Listen to your partner, Mr. Solo,” the man suggests. “Though I don’t think you will.” He pauses, and turns toward Illya, seemingly ignoring the fact there’s still a gun trained on him. “Did I ever tell you how many loops I had to get to know your little team?”  
  
Illya says nothing. He’s certainly not going to give this asshole the satisfaction.

“Fifty, at least. And if there’s one thing I know, it is that your partner would rather die than see you die. So he’s _certainly_ never going to be able to kill you himself.”

“Cowboy,” Illya says again, steadfastly ignoring the man.

Napoleon’s jaw clenches and the muscle jumps under his skin. “He’s right,” Napoleon grits out, almost a whisper.

“He’s not.”

He gives a tiny shake of his head, moving only a fraction. “I can’t.”  
  
“You can,” Illya insists. “You have to.”

And then, suddenly, the situation becomes a lot more dire, because the guards have returned with what must be the antidote. The syringe is already full of a blue liquid, ready to inject, and the sight sends a bolt of fear through Illya. He tries to struggle out of the grip of the guards and manages to knock two of them over, but there are just too many.

“Napoleon,” Illya says with more urgency as he’s pressed back down to his knees. “Do it!”

“There has to be another way,” Napoleon protests, glancing to Illya for only a moment.

“There isn’t, you know it,” Illya tells him desperately.

The guard carrying the syringe gets closer and closer, until he’s standing over Illya. They are completely out of time.

“Napoleon!” Illya yells, but his partner’s hard gaze doesn’t waver from the man in charge. “ _Napoleon, SHOOT ME NOW!_ ”

Finally, Napoleon’s eyes flicker down to Illya, and the anguish in them is unbearable. Illya doesn’t look away. He can’t. Not with what he’s asking Napoleon to do. Distantly, he can hear the man laughing, but the world seems to have narrowed down to nothing more than the two of them.

 _Please_ , Illya mouths.

In the next moment, Napoleon drops his gun to Illya, squeezes his eyes shut, and fires.

* * *

Illya wakes up with a precise, circular gunshot scar exactly over his heart. It _aches_ , and not in the way the lingering wounds usually do. He lies in bed until he hears Napoleon humming and he knows he needs to get up, but facing the day is excruciating with the memory of what happened in the previous one so fresh in his mind.

He makes it to the kitchen just in time to stop Napoleon from burning himself, and he can’t quite keep the desperation from the kiss he pulls his partner into. This time when he breaks away from the kiss he doesn’t let go of Napoleon, wraps him instead in a hug so tight that the man almost squeaks. He can feel the bewilderment in Napoleon’s rigid posture, moreso even than usual, but then his partner’s arms wrap around him, unquestioning, and he feels the ache in his heart slowly abate by small fractions.

There’s no way around telling them what happened; his partners have to know _everything_ about the previous iterations if they’re going to stay ahead of their adversaries. Illya takes them through the power station and getting the door open, all the way up through their search of the underground facility, before he falters.

“They got the drop on us,” he forces himself to say, not looking at either of his partners. His hand goes white around the pencil as he marks out their positions and those of their opponents on the schematic of the underground level. “Managed to take me, but not you. The man in charge was here. You were nearby, with your gun on him. Bunch of guards here and here, guns on you. They were going to give me the antidote, pull me out of the loop.”

“And?” Gaby prompts, when Illya falls silent again. “Obviously they didn’t.”

Illya shakes his head and finally looks up at Napoleon, and he can tell by the uneasy look in his eyes that his partner is starting to put the pieces together. “I… I needed to die, so I told you to—”

“No,” Napoleon interrupts, shaking his head wildly. “ _No_.”

“Cowboy, there was no other option—”

But Napoleon still doesn’t let him continue. “If I was armed, why wouldn’t I just kill the man in charge? That’s what we want, right?”  
  
“It wasn’t going to work,” Illya says, trying to keep his voice steady even as Napoleon becomes more and more agitated. “If you had shot him, the guards would have still killed you _and_ pulled me out, and then there would be no resets. Not for us. It was the lesser of two evils.”

“ _Bullshit!_ ” Napoleon yells, then turns on his heel and storms out of the house.

Illya’s shoulders sag and he leans heavily on the table as the ache in his chest returns in full force. After a moment Gaby’s small hand slides over top of his, warm and grounding.

“There was no other option,” he repeats, and his voice sounds so small and broken even to his own ears.

“I know that,” Gaby says quietly, soothingly. “And he does too, deep down. He’ll come to terms with it, he will. But right now he needs you to go to him.”

She’s right, he knows she is, as painful as the idea of talking about it is.  
  
He finds Napoleon standing on the porch of the safehouse, staring out into the forest. There is unmistakable tension in his shoulders and his hands are clenched into fists at his side. Illya steps out until he is side by side with his partner, and they stand there together, in silence, for a long moment.

“How could I do that?” Napoleon asks eventually, his tremulous voice barely more than a whisper. “I just can't see how I could possibly do it, even knowing you would ‘reset’, or whatever the fuck this is.”

“Cowboy,” Illya says, turning toward him, but Napoleon’s gaze remains fixated on the trees. “Napoleon, look at me.”

Finally, Napoleon turns, and Illya is shocked to see tears streaking his cheeks. He’s never seen Napoleon cry, not even when he was dying in the kitchen, and the sight is fairly terrifying. He reaches forward to pull Napoleon into his arms and his partner goes willingly, pressing his face into Illya’s shoulder.

“You did it for me,” Illya murmurs, holding him close. “Because I asked you to. And I shouldn’t have, I know, it’s not fair. I’m sorry, Cowboy.”

Napoleon is quiet for a long moment before he speaks again, pushing his words into Illya’s shirt. “I can’t do it again.”

 _Yes, you can_ , Illya thinks sadly, but he doesn’t say it. He knows that if it came down to it, Napoleon would pull the trigger, because he is far stronger than he thinks he is. Because he would always do anything for Illya, even the unthinkable.

“You won’t have to,” he promises instead. It’s a dangerous promise to make, but Illya also knows that he couldn’t ask Napoleon to do it again. Couldn’t take more of this pain. Illya is, in the end, the one that is not strong enough.

He presses a kiss to Napoleon’s temple and buries his face in his partner’s hair, drinking the the scent of his pomade and that thing that is uniquely him. They stand there for a long while, wrapped in each others arms, until Napoleon takes a deep breath that he exhales as a shaky sigh.

“We should go plan,” he says, his voice still muffled by Illya’s shirt.

Illya pulls back slightly and lifts a hand to cup Napoleon’s face, tipping it up toward his. “In a minute,” he murmurs, and then kisses him.

Illya never could have imagined that kissing the man he loves could make his heart ache so intensely. He can taste the sorrow in it, even more than the salt of Napoleon’s tears. Their tracks are drying on his cheeks, and Illya rubs his thumb through them, knowing for certain that this loop _cannot_ end the way the previous one did, because he can never be the cause of these tears ever again.

Gaby is waiting for them when they finally come back inside, and she has put her time to good use. The table is near covered by explosive charges, assembled and ready to go. Illya and Napoleon blink at her in surprise.

“The way I see it,” she says without preamble, “we need the antidote, and then we need to blow the whole place, preferably with that bastard inside it. Make sure any trace of the drug is destroyed. These are for the outer walls,” she says, gesturing to one pile, “and these are for placing in the basement. I’ll kill the power, and then you have 15 minutes to get underground, get the antidote, place the charges, and get out. I’ll place the ones around the outside when I get there. Agreed?”

Illya and Napoleon look at each other, then back at Gaby, and nod. How could they not?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> They have a plan! Will it work??? Tune in tomorrow (or the next day, to be perfectly honest with you) to find out if our intrepid trio can pull it off!


	7. No. 29: Emergency Room

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And now, the thrilling conclusion!

This time, they trick their targets into believing that Napoleon is the one who is resetting the day, and they find themselves in a familiar standoff. Well, familiar to Illya, anyway, except now he’s the one holding the gun at the man in charge while Napoleon is forced to his knees. He hadn’t realized it during the previous loop, but the guards actually bring two doses of the antidote with them and pass one to the man in charge.

It explains why they didn’t just shoot Napoleon before, because clearly their adversary was suspicious enough to not trust that they had the right person until after the antidote had been administered. Once it has been, though, they’ll know they’ve been duped this loop, and there will be nothing stopping them from killing Napoleon.

The man in charge also gets handed another vial of liquid, this one an odd greenish color, with some kind of aerosolizer fitted to the end of it, like an inhaler. It must be the drug itself, the substance that somehow imparts the ability to reset the day, and Illya knows that under no circumstances can he allow it to be deployed.

The guard carrying the antidote approaches Napoleon, syringe at the ready, and the two partners share a meaningful glance. They talked through a few scenerios, but never one in which there were two antidotes in play. Illya isn’t even sure that Napoleon knows there is; after all, he’d missed that fact when he’d been the one forced to the ground.

Illya would really rather not do this day again—would really rather not have to explain this sequence of events to Napoleon again—so he has to make this count.

He waits until every eye in the room is focused on Napoleon, watching for whatever happens when the antidote is administered. Even the man in charge lets his guard down for a moment, a wide grin spreading over his face, and this is when Illya acts.

Lunging forward, he makes a grab for the drug and the antidote, both held in the man’s left hand, but unfortunately the man reacts faster than he expected, twisting away and leaving Illya holding only one of the vials. There is at least a little luck on their side, though, because when he opens his hand he sees the odd green liquid glinting there. The drug.

He doesn’t have much time to think about what to do with it. Napoleon yelps as the guard plunges the antidote syringe into his shoulder and injects, and somehow the man in charge knows _immediately_ that they’ve been duped. He snarls, wheeling on Illya, and leaps at him in a desperate attempt to get the drug back. Two bullets to the chest somehow aren’t enough to bring him down—granted, neither of them were very accurate under the circumstances, even at close range—and he collides heavily with Illya, sending them both sprawling to the floor. The vial is clenched tightly in Illya’s fist, safe from the man’s prying fingers, but Illya loses track of the antidote until a needle jams right into his thigh.

Fire spreads rapidly through his veins and he can _feel_ it leaving his body, knows without a doubt that if he dies this time it will be for good. The pain of it briefly overwhelms his senses, but it ebbs as rapidly as it came on and he’s left reeling and feeling oddly empty.

“Kill him! Kill him now!” the man is shouting desperately, and Illya doesn’t know if he means him, or Napoleon, or both of them.

Turns out, neither do the guards. The ones nearest to them stand there uncertainly, and it probably doesn’t help that the man is on top of Illya and thus blocking most of their shots. Illya can hear the sounds of fighting from somewhere in Napoleon’s direction, so he assumes his partner has taken advantage of the chaos to get free and turn on the guards around him, and this in turn draws the attention of the two guards nearest Illya. They raise their guns toward the other side of the room, and Illya knows he has to end this _now_.

Finally, he manages to wrench his gun free from where it is pinned under them, jams it against the man’s head, and fires. He pushes the limp form off of his body and scrambles off the ground, dropping both guards with the remaining bullets in his clip. There is still another, farther across the room, still focused on where Napoleon is struggling with the last two guards that had held him. Illya watches as the third guard takes aim when the fight swings around to offer a clear shot of Napoleon. There’s no way Illya will be able to take him down before he fires, and so he does the only thing he can do.

Launching himself across the remaining space, he smashes into Napoleon and the guard, sending them both sprawling to the floor, just as he hears the gun fire twice. The bullets slam into his left shoulder and chest, sending a too-familiar white hot pain lancing through his body, and it almost feels like just another loop except it’s _not_.

Dying has become old hat, for Illya, but _living_ is an entirely new proposition.

He slumps toward the ground, distantly hearing the sounds of fighting and bullets firing around him again until finally those seem to fade away. The vial of the drug slips from his hand, clattering to the floor and rolling off under a table.

Pain stabs through him again as someone—Napoleon, it must be—presses on his wounds, but the world around him is rapidly fading.

“Fuck! No no no, Illya, you _idiot_ —”

* * *

Illya has flashes of something like lucidity.

The heat of an explosion. A spike of pain as he’s lowered to the ground. Bright lights and frantic voices. A warm, solid mass pressed against his side.

He’s not sure if they’re real, dreams, or something else entirely.

* * *

He wakes, for the first time in over a month, in a different bed.

At first the world seems like it’s nothing but white light, and he thinks maybe he’s finally actually dead, but then the walls and ceiling materialize around him. The air is filled with the soft hums and steady beeps of medical equipment, and the scent of antiseptic and bleach. A hospital, he thinks distantly.

Illya tries to push himself up in the bed, but that quickly proves to be a terrible idea. He hisses as pain sears through the left side of his chest, and the abortive movement sets several of the machines to a far more rapid beeping. Hurried footsteps echo into the room, and for a few minutes he just sits there as skilled hands fuss over the IV lines and his bandages. One of the nurses must administer some morphine, because a moment later the pain begins to ebb.

When he finally opens his eyes again, there is a familiar face standing at the foot of his bed.

“You do know you’re not _actually_ immortal, right?” Gaby scolds him, but the fond, relieved expression on her face takes all of the weight out of it.

“Was never _immortal_ ,” Illya mutters, crossing his arms in front of him defensively.

“Napoleon told me what happened, in the office. You could have died. _Permanently_.”

Napoleon. All at once Illya realizes that he’s not here, and why would he not be here unless—

Gaby must see his sudden distress, because she moves quickly around the bed and places a steadying hand on his arm. “He’s fine, Illya, he’s not hurt. He just stepped out to get some food. It’s been nearly impossible to get him to leave your side. The nurses want to throttle him, I think. He’s gonna be so pissed that he wasn’t here when you woke up.”

“What happened?” he manages as he takes deep, slightly painful breaths, still trying to get his panic under control.

“Well, after you tried to get yourself killed, Napoleon took out the remaining guards and carried you out of the building. I thought you were already dead when I saw you, Illya, but thank god you’re a stubborn bastard. We blew the chemical building into atoms and stole a car. I don’t know how you didn’t bleed out on the way to the hospital. The doctors said it was basically a miracle.”

Illya huffs out a humorless laugh at that, wincing again at the pain it elicits. He opens his mouth to ask how long he’s been out, but the words are cut off by the sound of someone practically sprinting down the hall. Moments later, Napoleon appears in the door, wide-eyed and disheveled. Clearly someone—almost certainly Gaby—had at some point made him go shower and change his clothes at least once because he’s not wearing his tactical gear anymore, but his clothes are still a rumpled mess. He’s also, quite obviously, deliriously happy to see Illya awake.

“Oh god, Peril, how long have you been awake?” he asks frantically as he rushes over to Illya’s side. “I’m sorry, I was here but then Gaby told me to go get something to eat even though I wasn’t hungry—”

“I just woke up, Cowboy,” Illya interrupts, uncrossing his arms so he can reach out to grab Napoleon’s hand, lacing their fingers together.

This little gesture puts a smile on Napoleon’s face that lights up the room and fills Illya’s chest with a fierce warmth. He gives a little tug of suggestion and Napoleon bends readily down to press a kiss to his lips. It’s brief, a brush of mouths that lingers just long enough to promise so much more, and Illya feels his heart ache with happiness.

Because until that moment, Illya wasn’t entirely sure how much of it had been _real_. Obviously the operation at the compound had happened, but he couldn’t be certain of even that morning, of holding Napoleon tight in his arms and kissing away his tears.

“It was all real,” he breathes in wonder as Napoleon sits down on the bed next to him. “You remember.”

“If you’re asking if I remember you walking into the kitchen of the safehouse the morning after we arrived and kissing me like your life depended on it, yes, I remember,” Napoleon says, a tiny smirk twisting his lips. “As for the rest, well, we pulled off an operation that never should have been possible, so…”

“We haven’t mentioned any of it in our debriefs,” Gaby tells him. “Not even Waverly knows.”

The reason why is obvious, of course. Such a claim would no doubt trigger a mandatory psych eval and some serious skepticism about Illya’s mental stability. He can’t blame them, but at the same time he knows what happened to him was real. At least, he knows now.

“Thank you,” he says quietly. “For everything.”

Gaby smiles, soft and sincere. “You need to rest,” she tells him as she bends down to kiss him gently on the forehead. “Dying that many times has to take a lot out of you.”

“That is quite an understatement,” Illya grumbles.

She squeezes his arm fondly. “I need to go tell Waverly you’re awake, but I’ll try to keep him away until tomorrow at least.”

Illya knows she’s just making up an excuse to give them some time alone, but he very much appreciates it nonetheless. When she leaves, closing the door to the room behind her, he looks up at Napoleon again, and the sheer amount of affection in his partner’s eyes is breathtaking.

“Stay with me?” he asks, squeezing Napoleon’s hand where it’s still wrapped around his.

Without a moment of hesitation, Napoleon kicks off his shoes and climbs up onto the narrow hospital bed, which is _really_ not large enough for the two of them, but he fits his body next to Illya’s like it was made to go there. He pulls one arm up under his head and gently pushes a lock of hair off Illya’s forehead, pressing a kiss to his temple as he curls his other arm over Illya’s stomach.

“Always, Peril,” he whispers. “Always.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's all for loops! Thanks so much for all your lovely comments and your excitement for this fic. Apparently I can't stop writing stories where Illya ends up questioning reality (if you liked this, check out [Light Will Keep Your Heart Beating in the Future](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25879594) if you haven't already for similar themes). But I do think after this one I'm going to need some fluff in my life!


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